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I'm a well-known mainframe performance guy, with almost 30 years of experience helping customers manage systems. I also dabble in lots of other technology. I've sought to widen the Performance role, incorporating aspects of infrastructural architecture.

Of course presentations are "slow trains coming": I widely trailed my desire to write
IKWYDLS in 2011 and finally revealed it early this year.
(In fact it evolved through the course of the year into
"I Know What You Did THIS Summer"
and I now
refer to is as "I Know What You Did This Last Summer".) Or "IKWYDTLS" for short.

SITC arose much more spontaneously - being initially a presentation for a customer
working group. (And it still has some of that genesis in it - with a rather pointed "where from here?"
slide left in.)

The point of the above is generally I don't just get up one day and decide "today I'll put on a show":
You have to "record" before you can "gig".
(Of course I do just say stuff sometimes.)

So what about 2013?

I have two ideas swirling around in my head, and I'd like to know if either appeals to you:

Time For D.I.M.E.

The Life And Times Of An Address Space

Time For D.I.M.E.

This is more a "campaign" presentation in that I really do think it's time (judging
by my customer set) for customers (particularly those running z196 and zEC12 machines, but
also z114) to consider memory usage afresh.
(DIME is, of course, short for Data In Memory Exploitation.)
(With the advent - a while back but practically into 2013 - of DB2 Version 10 this becomes
even more relevant.)

This is probably the presentation my management would be keener I wrote - though it's
one I personally feel strongly about anyway.

The Life And Times Of An Address Space

I like to write occasionally about more abstract things, things with less immediate punch
in their message.
This presentation is very much in that category.
Its origins are, I think, the lower-level pieces of IKWYDTLS.
When giving that presentation I had to gloss over the address space piece.
And there was so much more I wanted to say than was even on the slides.
And stuff has happened this year that makes it even worse - as regular readers of this
blog will know.

I also think there's something of a (pseudo-)intellectual framework to be espoused here:
For example, we can view batch jobs and CICS regions as looking very different but actually
there is much commonality.
I'd like to explore that.

(There is a practical benefit as it's important to use the commonality but respect the
differences when designing reporting.)

I also think it's important to get beyond the idealised address space and into practical
examples, such as CICS and DB2.

(Somehow BBEdit,
which I'm writing this in, seems to have learned to prompt me with the words
"CICS" and "DB2.)

So How About You?

What do you think of those two ideas?
Feel free to comment here or in any other way you like.
The aim is to take these two ideas (and any others) and turn them into useful material,
whether actual presentations, blog posts, analysis code or whatever.

The next step is probably to inflict more of my handwriting on you.
And, as I'm not so good at graphics, I might collect some napkins from around the world to draw
them on and post photos of these rough drafts as we go along.
Now wouldn't it be fun to do a presentation composed entirely of photos of drawings on interesting
pieces of paper, sides of cows, people holding placards2 etc?

Notes:

1 Queen fans tend to refer to songs and albums by obscure sets of initials, so that "TMLWKY" is "Too Much Love Will Kill You",
"NOTW" is "News Of The World" etc.. TMI? Perhaps.